Mors Cerebri wants to be a rogue-like influenced game with interesting gameplay. But it has to face its worst enemies on the way: C++, SFML, no time and an unexperienced hobby game developer, me.
This is the frustrating journey of a man and his game.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

A New Beginning

Welcome to the first entry of the Mors Cerebri development blog!

So what is this about?

Several years ago I started a project where I was developing a small game in my spare time together with a friend. We worked on it for some months and had some basic game play and mechanics going, but then the project was abandoned due to lack of ideas, design issues and time limitations. This game was called Mors Cerebri and it was intended to be a graphical rogue-like with horror elements and inventive ideas.

In the meantime I have gained quite some knowledge in programming throughout my full-time job as a software developer (though not in the games industry) and I am willing to give Mors Cerebri a second chance. I want this game to see the light of day, as it was the most ambitious project ever for me and I loved the shape it started to take.

This will be a full starting-from-scratch for me with the game, because my programming style has drastically changed over the years and the old code was very messy. Of course, many fragments of the old game will eventually end up in the new one, but the general code design will be redone and brought to a current standard.

Mors Cerebri will be written in C++11 using SFML2. At the same time, I am writing a custom extension library called Sling, which will provide some general systems and helpers related to game development in particular. I am aware of Thor, but in order to boost my experience in the process, I decided not to use it but to implement what I need by myself.

What will this blog cover?

My only goal with this blog is to keep myself motivated with the development of Mors Cerebri. There was once a post by Garry, stating that in order to keep yourself going, you should not tell anyone what you are doing. This never worked for me. I feel pressured to reveal my work, I start to rush and write code hastily. And in the end, projects are getting pigeonholed nevertheless. So I hope to have a better chance when people know what I'm working on, plus you guys might have interesting feedback and input to give.

So in this blog I will post progress of Sling and Mors Cerebri (which by the way will not be open source for now), be it concepts, code or screenshots/videos, but I will also talk about general programming topics, mainly C++ though. I encourage anyone reading this blog to add his/her thoughts and give feedback and criticism.

The first real entry will follow soon and focus on what Mors Cerebri came to be back in the day.